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Financial advisors are hardly lacking for talking points these days. There are wars, earthquakes, tsunamis and a nuclear catastrophe. The dollar is plunging and commodities are soaring. Cities and states are running out of cash, and the federal government isn't far behind. That's to say nothing of the explosion of new financial products, from exchange-traded funds to a grab-bag of alternative assets, and the rise of trading that happens in milliseconds rather than minutes.

The extraordinary combination of events isn't just setting the agenda for advisor-client meetings; it's putting advisors' skills to the test and shaking up the industry. Advisors with the know-how and tools are clearly making the most of it, as you can see on our annual listing of America's top 100 financial advisors. (To see the complete ranking click here.)

Vital Stats

Here's how the Top 100 look as a group.

New Names

25

Typical Account

$25 mil

Average Assets Under Management

$5 bil

2011 One-Year Asset Growth

12%

2010 One-Year Asset Growth

17%

Average Years in Industry

26

Years at Current Firm

17

Twenty-five advisors not on last year's roster have earned spots on the new one, and some repeaters have scored huge gains. Sanjan Dhody of Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown, for instance, shot from No. 24 last year into the top 10. Robert Inbody of Morgan Stanley, No. 100 last year, has vaulted to No. 55. When the going gets cataclysmic, there's no telling how far a good advisor might go.

Our ranking is based on each advisor's assets under management, revenue generated for his or her firm, and the quality of the practice. We don't explicitly consider investment performance, in part because advisors pursue such a wide range of investment objectives. Preserving the family fortune is often more important for a customer than scoring big gains. But advisors with an impressive amount of assets under management are probably meeting the objectives -- or else clients would be leaving and new ones wouldn't be joining.

This listing differs markedly from the Top 1,000 report we published in February. That list showed the leading advisors in each state; this one identifies the leaders without regard to location. Most work at big brokerage houses, though smaller firms are also represented.

The No. 1 advisor is Gregory Vaughn of Morgan Stanley Private Wealth Management. Working from Menlo Park, Calif., he and his team oversee accounts totaling some $9.7 billion. These aren't just any accounts, either; the average size is $75 million. Vaughn has been finding some opportunities well off the beaten trail; he thinks the Norwegian market offers some great resources plays. Closer to home, he's buying certain types of California municipal bonds, undaunted by the state's fiscal woes.

The top advisors are focused intently on making sense of the big picture -- not only of world events but clients' entire financial positions, from cash needs to philanthropy. But some also take pride in their profession's historical backbone, stock-picking. Deutsche Bank's Bruce Treitman loves to scour for companies with strong balance sheets and histories of dividend hikes.

Like Vaughn, most advisors on our list are looking for smart, safe ways to play the tumult in municipal bonds, long a cornerstone of wealthy investors' portfolios. And, with fears of inflation mounting, the advisors are keeping a close eye on the spectacular run-up in commodities prices (see story "Time for Commodities?").

Mark Curtis, veteran advisor with Morgan Stanley, is in many ways the embodiment of the advisors who made this year's list -- a conservative practitioner with a sophisticated knowledge of how markets work and the vast panoply of investment possibilities to offer.

Curtis joined E.F. Hutton in Palo Alto in 1982. While the name of the firm on his business card has changed repeatedly to reflect Wall Street's successive mergers, he has never thought of leaving his post or even planning for his own retirement. "My father's best year in this business was the year before he died," Curtis points out. "I wanted to do this for all of my life, to follow in his footsteps and be as important to my clients as he was to his. And I want to keep doing it for the rest of my life."

He also takes a long-term view in investing. "It's a mistake to think investment themes change quickly," says Curtis. That's sound advice in a world that seems to be spinning faster with each passing day.

Bruce Treitman was always intrigued by money, but after a stint as an accountant for Coopers & Lybrand right out of college, he realized that burrowing into corporate ledgers wasn't how he wanted to spend the rest of his professional life. "My roommate at the time was a broker, and he seemed to have much more fun, so I ended up going to work at Merrill Lynch," he recalls. "Every day seemed to offer something new and exciting.

Unlike many of his peers, the 52-year-old Treitman maintains a link to those days by managing money himself, rather than turning it over to managers he selects. "Most brokers don't do that any more, but while we might use separate accounts or ETFs, the crown jewel of our group is the money we manage ourselves," he says.

Bruce Treitman

Treitman seeks out companies with impressively strong balance sheets and histories of dividend growth, and then sells call options against them to enhance returns. He has also set up municipal-bond ladders, enabling him to combine the higher returns available from longer-duration securities with the certainty of having money coming due every year. He isn't rattled by the dire predictions of muni-bond bears because he seeks out the safest choices. Example: certain types of school-district bonds, especially in wealthy areas with few home foreclosures. He's so intent on ensuring these holdings stay safe that he pores over the current regulatory filings from each of the 400-plus different bonds in his clients' portfolios.

"I want to help people not blow it," Treitman says. Just as he says he will only buy a municipal bond "if I can't figure out any scenario where it will go bad." He also reminds people of the need for low volatility in other types of investments, even in runaway bull markets.

Today, with the employment picture improving and GDP rising for six straight quarters, there are lots of reasons to be optimistic about the U.S. economy, but Treitman isn't allowing himself to get carried away, just as he didn't during the run-up to the 2008 crash. (In the wake of that, Treitman says, his average client lost only about 15%, compared with market losses of 40% or more.)

"I'm limiting risk by sticking with high-quality risk assets, even if I'm not as worried as some others by things like inflation," he says. Treitman acknowledges the inflationary impact of commodity prices but points out that the economy still has plenty of excess capacity, and housing prices have yet to recover.

"Yes, there's a lot of volatility, and that can arise at anytime so I'm not going to be dogmatic about anything," he says. "As an advisor, my job is to build portfolios that take into account the possibility of both good and bad things happening down the road."

Mark Curtis not only lives in the Silicon Valley house where he grew up, he is following in his father's footsteps as a financial advisor. "Because of the way my father worked with and felt about his clients, he was vital to their lives," he says. "I liked the fact that he was so important to them that they would call at night or come around the house on weekends." So it was an easy decision for Curtis to move into a job with the former E.F. Hutton in Palo Alto after his graduation from Stanford. "The name has changed, but I've never left the firm."

He is similarly straightforward when it comes to helping his own clients manage their assets. He points out that before the market crash, a "pitch book," or report packed full of charts and quantitative analyses, was a common way to convince clients that an advisor was sophisticated and on top of the latest trends in asset management. "Now, in 2011, we earn client trust by simplifying the complicated," the 54-year-old Curtis says. "We put the presentations and pitch books away."

Mark Curtis

Something else that has changed in recent years: Clients have become more focused on getting a global perspective on the big game-changing trends than they are on the quarterly quantitative perspective. That doesn't mean he can take his focus off what's happening right now; he is currently on the lookout for inflation. "I have had the luxury of never having had to worry about inflation for the nearly 30 years I've been doing this," he explains. Less important than trying to gauge when it might materialize or how bad it will be is to get clients accustomed to the idea that this is indeed a risk. The danger of inflation is one reason he's been allocating part of his clients' money to hard assets–including everything from agricultural products and metals to water and an exchange-traded fund tied to the performance of rare-earth manufacturers. He's not speculating on these, he stresses: "It's much better to be a long-term investor."

"The best way to make money is not to lose it in the first place." That's the lesson Bill Greco learned in his first year out of college, working for a private money manager responsible for investing millions of dollars of pension-fund assets. Even though Greco stayed there only a year or so before moving on to work with retail investors -- first at E.F. Hutton, and later at Paine Webber and UBS -- those words remain at the heart of his approach to his business.

"My clients have become wealthier over time, and I've added a lot of experience, of course," the 47-year-old advisor says. "But I've remained a believer in finding holistic solutions for my clients as well as in convincing them that the way to deal with risk is to understand it and not run away from it."

That, Greco says, can be a challenge in the wake of the 2008 market crisis. Many investors remain wary and fearful of future upheavals, and Greco spends a significant part of his time helping them grasp the nature of risk and understand how much of it to take. In some cases, ultra-rich clients can avoid taking on much risk because their wealth has reached a level that doesn't require it. They can afford to stay in assets like stable blue-chip stocks and strong bond funds.

William Greco

But even when a client's needs and objectives dictate risk-taking, Greco is quick to point out that they don't need obscure and incomprehensible products. "People complicated the process too much in the late 1990s and into the last decade," he says. "Increasing returns and yields doesn't mean having to venture into the realm of the esoteric."

These days some high-yielding securities can look deceptively straightforward; the trick becomes figuring out what risks may lie hidden in the simplest of structures. "For a while, people thought munis were more plain vanilla than they were," he says. "Nowadays, if you own a high-yielding muni fund, you need to be sure you understand why that is -- whether the fund has a longer duration than its peers or that it is moving further down in quality to pick up yield."

Greco's client base is made up of business executives and business owners, many of whom may have a significant portion of their net worth tied up in their company or their company's stock. To help curb what he describes as a casino mentality that still dominates the financial markets, Greco tries to get investors to think about their portfolios the same way that they might view their own business -- not focusing on quarterly swings, but on the long-term trajectory.

His own role within his 16-person team is as a stock-investing specialist. While he is intrigued by the growth potential of emerging- markets equities, he is also acutely aware of the risk they can add to a portfolio, so he's approaching them warily. "Some of my international clientele who work and live in these environments are more concerned about the return of their capital than the return on it," Greco says.

Back in 1979, when Robert Waldele finally convinced Merrill Lynch to hire him in the firm's fixed-income marketing division, the job was to sell clients a product. Now, as head of a six-person team within the same firm's advisory business, he is marketing his services as a solution-provider to corporate executives, professional athletes, hedge-fund managers and other wealthy individuals who make up his client base. "These days we have to have trust, service, solutions and performance all in place, day in and day out," the 54-year-old Waldele says. "I tell my clients I want to know them better–financially speaking–than they know themselves."

He wants to win his clients' first phone call whenever they have a question about finances, and that requires doing all kinds of things that weren't part of his practice even a decade ago. "If I want to win that phone call, I need to be able to work with all the other members of their team on questions about insurance, trusts and estate plans," he adds. He also makes a point of building a rapport with the children of his clients.

Robert Waldele

But the main way Waldele wins the loyalty of his clients and their heirs is through investment performance. For instance, while other investors may shun municipal bonds after hearing the warnings of Meredith Whitney and other high-profile bears, Waldele doesn't rule them out altogether. "Not every muni bond was really a triple-A five years ago; they just looked that way because of the muni-bond insurance," he points out.

In addition to investments such as munis and stocks of companies that have a history of raising their dividend payout at regular intervals, Waldele is steering clients into some more-offbeat investments, such as private-equity investments in funds offered by Blackstone and Carlyle, as well as a Lone Star Funds investment vehicle specializing in commercial mortgages. "A typical client might have 5% of his assets in an alternative portfolio that includes funds like these," Waldele says.

"At the end of the day," he says, "if I don't bring in performance numbers at a level that matches whatever the market is offering, based upon the risk being taken, then I'm not doing my job. I haven't earned that trust and that first call on their next financial decision."

When Brian Ward was pondering a career, he went about the process methodically. "I wanted something that could grow, that would scale. I also knew I didn't want to get trapped in a bureaucracy but to work in a meritocracy that combined an entrepreneurial dimension with the ability to draw on the resources of a bigger firm," he explains. Puzzling his way through this led him to the investment business, where he saw no limit to the creativity he could deploy on behalf of his clients.

The changes he has seen in his chosen career since he joined the now-defunct Kidder Peabody nearly two decades ago have only strengthened his conviction that he made the right call. "Back then, people had a collection of investments scattered among different advisors, rather than a portfolio that would act as a whole to get them where they want to be," Ward says. Now, managing the portfolio is what his business is about, and clients are looking for advisors who make the whole process feel smooth and straightforward.

Brian Ward

"If all I am doing is pitching a stock or shaving a few points off a mortgage, I'm not doing justice to a client's needs," he says. "My clients need me to tell them if they're on track or not -- and if not, to come up with solutions to get them moving in the right direction again."

Ward, 42, argues that this kind of service approach can even trump investment returns in importance to clients. "You can't control what the markets do; you can control the service you provide to your clients," he says. That means having direct conversations about the market environment and the level of risk, as well as seeking out protection from those risks. During the recent crisis, Ward says, his clients fared comparatively well thanks to a decision to hedge exposure to the markets. "We were blessed by being early to the alternatives-strategy game; we weren't just long the index."

Still, he says, it hasn't become any easier to convince a client to think like a contrarian. "Stocks are the only things most Americans don't want to buy on sale," he says. "They'll drive 15 miles to save on toilet paper, but assume that a market price is always the correct valuation." By contrast he's been scouring the landscape for discounted, value-priced securities and finding them in industrial and materials stocks.

Still, Ward insists that the way any financial advisor can add true value to a client's portfolio is by making the right calls when it comes to the big picture. He doesn't want to get distracted by such chatter as how gold is doing today. "Avoiding big drawdowns or losses is just as important or more important than deciding whether or not to make a 5% bet on crude oil," he says.

That means anything from getting a client's estate plan sorted out to minimizing the number of "what if?" scenarios that need to be borne in mind with investments. "That's what makes a real, material difference to their lives," Ward says.